Jonathan Corbet summarizing a presentation about the present and future of XFS by Dave Chinner:

XFS is often seen as the filesystem for people with massive amounts of data. It serves that role well, Dave said, and it has traditionally performed well for a lot of workloads. Where things have tended to fall down is in the writing of metadata; support for workloads that generate a lot of metadata writes has been a longstanding weak point for the filesystem. In short, metadata writes were slow, and did not really scale past even a single CPU.

After the break the video of Dave Chinner’s presentation, “XFS: Recent and Future Adventures in Filesystem scalability”.

Here’s the abstract of the patent filing submitted by MapR’s for a Map-Reduce Ready Distributed File System:

A map-reduce compatible disitrubuted file system that consists of successive component layers that each provide the basis on which the next layer is built provides transactional read-write -update semantics with file chunk replication and huge file-create rates. A primitive storage layer (storage pools) knits together raw block stores and provides a storage mechanism for containers and transaction logs. Storage pools are manipulated by individual file servers. Containers provide the fundamental basis for data replication, relocation, and transactional updates. A container location database allows containers to be found among all file servers, as well as defining precedence among replicas of containers to organize transactional updates of container contents. Volumes facilitate control of data placement, creation of snapshots and mirrors, and retention of a variety of control and policy information. Key-value stores relate keys to data for such purposes as directories, container location maps, and offset maps in compressed files.

You can get the complete PDF from here.

Original title and link: MapR’s Map-Reduce Ready Disitributed File System Patent Filing (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)